To listen to the audio version of Dr. Noble's reviews, just click on the book title to be taken to the full page. Audio is found either at the very beginning of the transcript or at the bottom of the page.

Julia Hightower Gregg has been a columnist for the “Evansville Courier and Press” in Indiana for 25 years but before becoming a Hoosier, if indeed one can ever become a Hoosier, Gregg grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, took a BS from Auburn University, then took an MS from Vanderbilt Peabody College and an MFA from Murray State University in Kentucky .

I have from time to time reviewed Young Adult novels and even a children’s book or two but this is my first foray into the Middle Grade, Young Readers category. Young Readers are ages 10 and up, grades 5 and up.

When I was a kid, on Saturday afternoons I caught the latest installment of Lash LaRue or Commander Don Winslow of the US Coast Guard, weekly series often ending in a literal cliff-hanger—to be continued next week. Like those matinees, Carolyn Haines’ “Bones” books have moved now from a mystery series to a mystery serial.

At 89 pages, Wade Hall’s study of Southern Civil War humor is definitely in this category. Considering that the war was a four-year bloodbath with, sometimes, tens of thousands dying on the same day, it may even be an oxymoron. It wasn’t a naturally funny subject.

Before seven on a Sunday morning, in the year 2000, Jack Prine is walking from his apartment to get some coffee and finds a “body … splayed out face down across a busted-up curb in the Faubourg Marigny, downriver of the quarter but not quite in the Bywater.”

Frye Gaillard is now recognized as one of Alabama’s most prolific and most important nonfiction writers with books on Southern literature, civil rights, NASCAR, country music, Jimmy Carter and, generally, all things Southern.

“Pasture Art” is Marlin Barton’s fifth volume of fiction—there have been two novels and two collections of stories—but this book stands a good chance to be his break-out book. The stories are more insightful, more psychologically complex than any of his previous work. As a story writer, he has arrived.

After taking the BA and the MA in journalism at the U of A, Kim Cross honed her skills working as editor-at-large at “Southern Living” and writing articles for outdoor and sport magazines such as “Bicycling” and “Runner’s World” and several newspapers, including “USA Today.” “What Stands in a Storm” is her first book, released March 10th, and it has every chance of being a best seller.

Title: Lost Capitals of AlabamaAuthor: Herbert James LewisPublisher: The History PressPages: 158Price: $19.99 (Paper)

Montgomery, chosen over competing bids from Tuscaloosa, Wetumpka, Mobile, Marion, Statesville, Selma and Huntsville, has been the state capital since 1846, indeed was the capital of the Confederacy for three months in 1861 before that was moved to Richmond, but it was not always so. Montgomery is our fifth capital; the other four “lost” capitals are the subject of Lewis’ brief, informative book.

In 2012 Odell published “The Healing,” a novel of black and white, master and slave, set on a Mississippi plantation in 1847. The heroine, Polly Shine, is an herbalist, feared as a witch, and powerful enough to organize the slaves and lead a quiet but devastating insurrection against Master Ben Satterfield and the Big House.

Robert Bailey, in practice as a civil defense trial lawyer in Huntsville for the past 13 years, has now joined the legion of Alabama attorneys to try their hand at fiction. And it’s not a bad start at all. “The Professor” has believable, interesting characters and, most importantly, pace.

This book first came to my notice in a review of new comic novels in the November 2nd “New York Times Book Review.” Brock Clarke called it “hilarious” and added, “if you don’t find those books funny, well, that means you’re a corpse.” So I took a look.

I’m alive! “Members” is a wry, small comic delight. College teachers, especially in the humanities, will love it.

To begin at the beginning: a resurrectionist is a body snatcher, a person who digs up newly buried bodies in a graveyard and delivers them to a medical school for students to work on and learn from in anatomy class.

“An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Art of H. L. Mencken”Author: Hal CrowtherPublisher: The University of Iowa Press; Muse Books: The Iowa Series in Creativity and WritingPages: 92Price: $16.00 (Paper)

The Iowa Muse Series is not full-fledged biography or literary criticism. These short books are actually extended essays that attempt to explain the very essence of the writer under consideration. Previous subjects have been as varied as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats and the James brothers, William and Henry.